The Slow Horses trailer revealed so much about the 4th season that it wasn’t exactly bad, but it was a bit unnecessary, all the effort to create a big suspense about “River Cartwright’s death”. Do you agree?

Those who read the books are constantly tense about the risk of our complex hero dying, but River Cartwright didn’t die in Slow Horses. At least not yet. That said, the season comes back with a bang and lots of new features, we need to keep an eye out for them.

Here at MiscelAna, I’ve already talked about the season’s complete plot, but let’s look at what we saw on the screen?

After all the strategic gamesmanship and confusion of last season, Ingrid Turney has effectively fallen from the Directorate of MI5, but Diana Tarvener has once again been passed over for the position and now it’s worse, the chosen one is lost, insecure, and clearly not capable of carrying out the role. She’s going to make Claude Whelan’s life hell!

In Slough House we have two new people, we’ll know more about them later. For now, Louisa has become close to River, and everyone misses Catherine Standish, who has effectively left the team.

We start immediately with an attempted terrorist in London, with the explosion of a shopping mall and the entire MI5 trying to understand the motive and who is behind it all. Seemingly unrelated, we have David Cartwright in advanced dementia, which makes River sad and worried. He tells Louisa that there are times when his grandfather doesn’t even recognize him. It seems that we witness one when River comes to visit him and David shoots him.

The mystery of who died among the nags keeps us believing it was River, but we all saw the trailer and know that unless the story goes into a flashback, he is still alive. I found this part of the script a bit irritating, even though it is theoretically well-structured. In times of inevitable spoilers – and there is the book that spoils everything too – I felt like I was playing with a child trying to do a magic trick while I saw everything that was happening.

Let’s talk about the “death of River Cartwright”: he warns us that David is paranoid, feeling persecuted and watched, but like him, we think it is a delusion. One rainy night he receives a visit from someone who introduces himself as River (and we hear his voice, but never see his face), and boom! David shoots him. As we had seen before, David looked at a photo of him with his grandson.

Scared, David runs away and it is Jackson Lamb who is sent to identify River’s body. Lamb is still disgusting and unbearable, he makes the irony of missing his face (which was shot) more difficult, but he recognizes that it was his agent who was murdered. From there, he immediately goes to Standish’s house, and in the back and forth between them, he confronts her that not only did she already know about the “murder” but she is also harboring David. In fact, River is alive – but missing – and David is confused, we still don’t know what happened.

The episode ends with River in the French countryside, with a passport that appears to belong to the murdered man in his place. What is he looking for? We don’t know yet, but it looks like Lamb already has an idea. What can we expect?

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